Book Reviews
Featured Review
Accidental Ethnography: An Inquiry into Family Secrets.
Christopher N. Poulos
Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008.
I thought writing this review would be an easy assignment to complete. After all, I’ve known Chris Poulos since I hired him out of his PhD program to be an assistant professor in a department I then chaired. Too, I knew a thing or two about family secrets, having spent the better part of five years researching and writing about my own. And I’ve read and admired his previous ethnographic work.
Like I said, I thought it would be easy. Knock it out in a weekend easy.
It has not been easy. And the work has added up to a lot more than a weekend. Why? Describing why that is the case, in fact, is the nature of this particular narrative problem. It is the problem—albeit a happy one—of explaining what hasn’t been easy.
For one thing, I have found myself delighted and yet confounded by the rare intelligence and true innovation that ranges throughout this book, which is, I warn you in advance, an intriguing story and totally absorbing read. I knew Chris had great talent, just not this particular great talent. What he does so well is to engage the concept of family secrets by interrogating his own family’s secrets, at once seemingly as ordinary as yours or mine—from the spoiled innocence of utterances such as “let’s not tell them” or “let’s keep this between us”—through a steady and increasingly telling accumulation of the long term effects of keeping those sources of lost innocence lost. So instead those family secrets and conspiracies of silence seek, and find, alternative forms of expression: unspoken and therefore unresolved alcoholism, failed and problematic relationships, explosions of violent anger, nightmarish fears of being found out, and yet—through it all—moments of genuine humane surprise and sudden, almost noetic sensemaking, which sometimes occurs, as he shows us, through the alternative symbolic forms of expression we simply call “dreams.”
I couldn’t put it down. I couldn’t stop identifying with it. Not that my stories are the same stories, of course, but they are close enough. Too narratively close, in fact, for personal much less scholarly comfort. Chris’s family secrets are not my family secrets, nor will they be yours, but my bet is you will find in them a certain symmetry of secrecy, silence, and its aftermath, which is the until now untold story of what it costs all of us to live this way, with our old secrets, with our uncomfortable silences, and with our troubled if occasionally revelatory dreams.
Yes. Exactly. That’s what Dr. Christopher Poulos is really talking about. What he titles Accidental Ethnography is all about finding ourselves suddenly and irreversibly in unknown situations—“accidents”—that cannot, and should not, be ignored. We find ourselves in the most everyday of family experiences—finding an old photo album, listening to a story told reluctantly by a relative, anxiety about an encounter with someone close to us, a heart-pounding waking in the night, a peaceful, reflective walk in the day or even in the midst of a daydream itself—and at the heart of it is a poignant ethnographic moment, layers of cultural coding inscribed on the very soul of the everyday. If only we take the time, and have the tools, to examine it.
Chris teaches us to examine it. He provides the tools.
Here’s the other thing. This is an immanently teachable book. The writing exercises that populate the ends of the chapters are entirely useful ways to think about and to apply the lessons contained in the text. These lessons are no surprise to me. Chris has always been a gifted teacher who works very hard to show students how to engage ideas through examinations of their own personal experiences and taken-for-granted or at least unquestioned narratives. What makes this book’s applications unique is their ability to make students, including those of us who think of ourselves as lifelong learners, to think on a higher level of reflective engagement.
Which brings me to my final point. One of the consistent joys of reading Chris Poulos’s work is that it so thoroughly integrates his intellectual background in religion, philosophy, and communication studies. Because he draws upon these diverse and seemingly disparate sources of understanding, what we have is an inspiring record of a cultivated habit of mind—a way of disciplined thinking through life experiences that makes productive and creative uses of intellectual engagement. Many times reading through these chapters I found myself stopped in my tracks, saying “hmmmm.” Some time later I would once again return to the narrative after having made a sympathetic mental and emotional journey of my own based on his encouragement to do so, and his own musings.
All of which is only to say, “Oh my!”
“Oh my” because if you purchase it, what you will have in your hands is a truly remarkable story that will engage, I have no doubt, your most creative and intellectual energies. If it were a new novel or work of creative nonfiction and if this were a perfect world it would win some important awards for its narrative quality. If it were a textbook on how to do “accidental ethnography” it would become a standard reference work, which anyway I think it will. From the other side of this story, let me say only this: I envy you the reading experience you are about to have.
Your secrets will never be the same.
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